(Pictured Above from left to right: Tim Whitney ITA, Christie Peters Sales Rep & Longwood alum, Clayton Lescalleet Intern)
I was lucky enough to recieve an internship from Airlie Hotel and Conference Center located in Warrenton, Virginia. Airlie is a great retreat for business people in the D.C./Metro area to get away from the busy city and hold a peaceful meeting or conference. Due to recent government cutbacks, Airlie became open to the public in the early 2000's. With over 1200 acres for guests to rome freely, Airlie has the repuation as a very relaxing venue.
Originally, Airlie Center was founded in 1959 When doctor Murdock Head purchased the farm with the vision of turning it into a venue where individuals and organizations could exchange ideas in a distraction-free, neutral environment amid the natural beauty of Virginia's Piedmont region. By integrating modern meeting facilities into the picturesque farm, Dr. Head succeeded in founding a world-renowned meeting and conference destination, a place LIFE magazine heralded as "an island of thought."
During my time at Airlie I got lucky to work with a great group. I worked with network issues around campus as well as fixed hardware issues on a daily basis. The equipment we had there at first was relatively outdated but i was lucky enough to be there for the installation of new, top of the line equipment. Below is a list of daily activites from my daily journal while on the job.
Worked with access points and gateways after storm surge knocked out connections.
Used a fluke access point scanner to find the affected access point.
Fixed a monitor issue on an employees computer where the dual screen was not working, I simply had to reboot computer then change display settings in the personalize desktop screen
Changed the port for room 9 was on in order to rid the phone line of static
Rearranged the office and made it more organized, aligned the wires on the back of the desk to tell more clearly what connects to what it should. Basically removed the birds nest of wires behind the desk.
Replaced switch in the hanger building to fix the operation and speed of computer systems on network.
Fixed the issue with the switch so where it could recognize the DNS. It had a blown capacitor in which it affected it to where it couldn't recognize the DNS, and it also had blown ports due to lightning.
Today at the internship, i got to play an hp computer that had windows 8 on it. I tried to downgrade the OS so that it could connect with our DNS server. Since it was a windows 8 home edition, it is actually unable to connect to a dns server without upgrading the OS.
worked with fiber optic transceivers
Rebooted computers to fix OS and bad data blocks
Worked with gateways, routers, and switches
Ran a different commands on the command prompt to ping gateways to see connection
Performed my first individual IT maintenance call
Opened up a cpu and learned about the different hardware parts of a computer.
Replaced old broken net gear switches with new working ones.
Set up and installed new avaya phone systems throughout Airlie campus.
Rearranged and organized the entire IT departments office.
Fixed different wifi, phone, and email problems upon request.
Learned the basic history of Airlie Foundations
Overall i would say i learned a whole lot from my expirience at airlie. I learend about enterprise hardware and software as well as how to fix major issues with the two. I also was able to improve my communication skills where i was having difficulties explaining the people what the problem was in simple terms. At the end of the internship i was offered a position within the I.T. department for the rest of the summer with was a great feeling. I was able to contiue to learn while making money at the same time, i could easily say i could enjoy doing this for a living.
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